Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20?years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed.     

Shared mobile displays: an exploratory study of their use in a museum setting

We conducted an exploratory study that examines the use of shared mobile displays such as mobile projectors and tablets to support group activities. We compare how a small group of visitors use either a shared display or personal individual devices in a museum visit context, in both a navigation task and a media viewing task. Group proximity, decision making, leadership patterns, and interaction between group members as well as attitudes are analyzed. We report on various usage patterns observed with group use of shared displays and discuss user preferences in comparison with the non-shared handheld alternative. Results show how mobile shared displays can support and enhance the group experience, by providing a shared mobile environment. Mobile shared displays increase group cohesiveness as was shown by increased proximity and amount of discussion by participants. Users perceive the use of shared displays as both useful and enjoyable, with the caveat that many users still want to retain individual control. We discuss this trade-off between groupness and individual control, as well as provide an analysis of the relative advantages of each shared display option.     

Examining Factors Influencing the Disruptiveness of Notifications in a Mobile Museum Context

Ubiquitous computing environments continuously infer our context and proactively offer us context aware services and information, suggested by notifications on our mobile devices. However, notifications come with a cost. They may interrupt the user in the current task and be annoying in the wrong context. The challenge becomes how to notify the user about the availability of relevant services while minimizing the level of disruptiveness. Thus, an understanding of what affects the subjective perception of the disruptiveness of the notification is needed. As yet, most of the research on disruptiveness of notifications focused on stationary, task-oriented environments. In this study, we examine the effect of notifications in a special leisure scenario—a museum visit. In two user studies conducted in a museum setting, participants used a context-aware mobile museum guide to receive information on various museum exhibits while periodically receiving notifications. We examined how the user’s activity, the modality of the notification, and the message content affected the perceived level of disruption that the notifications created. We discuss our results in light of existing work in the desktop and mobile domains and provide a framework and recommendations for designing notifications for a mobile museum guide system.     

Limited-resource scheduling by generalized rule-based system

A general paradigm for solving resource allocation, time-tabling, and scheduling problems is presented. The paradigm is based on an expert system approach, which looks for a feasible solution that satisfies the problem's real-life constraints. The new paradigm includes generic concepts for resources, activities, constraints, and allocations. The general control strategy of the new paradigm is suitable for a large family of resource allocation and time-tabling problems. This control strategy includes three parts that deal with allocation, constraint checking, and changes to allocations.

The proposed paradigm was tested on three real-world problems: crew assignment to air force missions, class scheduling for a university department, and time-tabling of final examinations for the faculty of natural sciences. All cases were solved well in a few minutes of central processing unit time, by Prolog-based systems that implemented the proposed paradigm. These case studies are described in the paper in some detail, and an overall evaluation of the methodology is given.     

Role of photonic bandgaps in polarization-independent grating waveguide structures

Polarization independence in a one-dimensional resonant grating waveguide structure involves the simultaneous excitation of two guided modes propagating in different directions. Possible simultaneous excitations occur when the two excited guided modes have either the same polarization, i.e., TE-TE (transverse electric) or TM-TM (transverse magnetic), or different polarizations, i.e., TE-TM. Simultaneous excitations may result in bandgaps and singularities. We confirm and show that in order to achieve polarization independence, it is necessary to find the conditions that minimize the effects of such bandgaps and singularities and experimentally demonstrate tunable polarization independence for simultaneously excited TE-TM-guided modes.     

Gamma-ray burst theory after Swift

Afterglow observations in the pre-Swift era confirmed to a large extend the relativistic blast wave model for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Together with the observations of properties of host galaxies and the association with (type Ic) SNe, this has led to the generally accepted collapsar origin of long GRBs. However, most of the afterglow data was collected hours after the burst. The X-ray telescope and the UV/optical telescope onboard Swift are able to slew to the direction of a burst in real time and record the early broadband afterglow light curves. These observations, and in particular the X-ray observations, resulted in many surprises. While we have anticipated a smooth transition from the prompt emission to the afterglow, many observed that early light curves are drastically different. We review here how these observations are changing our understanding of GRBs.     

Examining proactiveness and choice in a location-aware mobile museum guide

Cultural heritage is an area that has recently drawn research attention, especially for exploring ways to harness novel mobile technologies for supporting visitors. The main benefit of these novel technologies is their ability to provide personalized, context-aware information services to their users. However, the use of context-awareness is connected to a fundamental issue of proactiveness - should the system keep the user in control all the time and only respond to user requests, or should the system take initiative and propose its services when needed? Proactiveness of mobile visitors’ guides brings with it a possibility for better service to the user at the cost of taking control out of the user’s hand. The amount of choice given to visitors is another key issue. With the vast amount of information available for each exhibit, adaptation of the amount of information by limiting the number of content items, could be warranted to filter the information according to the visitors needs. However, it is not clear how reducing choice in terms of the number of content items that are presented to the visitor affects visitor behavior and satisfaction. We examined these issues in a controlled user study conducted with actual museum visitors; comparing usage, behavior patterns, and attitudes of visitors using three versions of a location-aware mobile museum guide.     

P2P case storage and retrieval with an unspecified ontology

Traditional approaches for similarity-based retrieval of structured data, such as Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), have been largely implemented using centralized storage systems. In such systems, when the cases contain both numeric and free-text attributes, similarity-based retrieval cannot exploit standard speedup techniques based on multi-dimensional indexing, and the retrieval is implemented by an exhaustive comparison of the case to be solved with the whole set of stored cases. In this work, we review current research on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and distributed CBR techniques and propose a novel approach for storage of the case-base in a decentralized Peer-to-Peer environment using the notion of Unspecified Ontology to improve the performance of the case retrieval stage and build CBR systems that can scale up to large case-bases. We develop an algorithm for efficient retrieval of approximated most-similar cases, which exploits inherent characteristics of the unspecified ontology in order to improve the performance of the case retrieval stage in the CBR problem solving cycle. The experiments show that the algorithm successfully retrieves cases close to the most-similar cases, while reducing the number of cases to be compared. Hence, it improves the performance of the retrieval stage. Moreover, the distributed nature of our approach eliminates the computational bottleneck and single point of failure of the centralized storage systems.     

Achievement-treatment interactions in programmed instruction.

Tested the hypothesis that level of instructional support is inversely related to students' prior achievement. 104 parochial elementary school students were randomly assigned to study an instructional program by constructed responding or by reading. Level of prior achievement was ascertained by pretest scores. Regression analysis confirmed the interaction between prior achievement and instructional support. Constructed responding was especially beneficial for students with low pretest scores. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)